Wednesday, 29 January 2014

Who would have thought that you could learn about maths at a poetry
reading? And what’s that got to do with rabbits anyway?

At a recent live literature event a poet friend, Trudi
Petersen, read some new work she had written using a syllable count that
follows the Fibonacci number sequence.

She’d tried writing haiku (those tiny, beautifully formed
poems that usually follow a 5-7-5 syllable pattern) and found it didn’t suit
her. So she worked with the Fibonacci series and she loved it. The
poetic results were stunning. Trudi wrote one of these Fib poems for me, as it
was my birthday, and that poem is below, so you can see how they work.

I love using form when I write poetry and I am especially
fond of those with very short counts, such as haiku. Now I want to give this idea a try and see what I can do with it.

Many artists and architects have used this ‘Golden Ratio’
number sequence to create their work – Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa being one
of the most famous examples.

Here’s a bit of an explanation on what it’s all about:

In mathematics the Fibonacci series are the numbers in
the following integer sequence:

1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89… The next number is found by adding up the two numbers before
it.

The sequence has been known in the East for thousands of
years, but it was brought to Europe by Leonardo Pisano Bogollo, who lived between
1170 and 1250 in Italy. Fibonacci was his nickname.

As well as being famous for the Fibonacci Sequence, he helped
spread through Europe the use of Hindu-Arabic
Numerals (our
present number system 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) to replace Roman Numerals.

Fibonacci numbers appear in nature often enough to show that they
reflect some naturally occurring patterns. You can commonly spot these by
studying the manner in which various plants grow.

Look at the array of seeds in the centre of a sunflower, for
example, and you'll notice what looks
like spiral patterns curving left and right. Amazingly, if you count these
spirals, your total will be a Fibonacci number. Divide the spirals into those
pointed left and right and you'll get two consecutive Fibonacci numbers. You
can decipher spiral patterns in pinecones, pineapples, cauliflower and a range
of other plants that also reflect the Fibonacci sequence in this manner. ­

And the rabbits? Bogollo is said to have first understood the sequence when calculating
the ideal expansion of pairs of rabbits.

There’s loads of information online, and much for the more
mathematically minded than I. These sites have been helpful: